This invention relates generally to the field of telephone systems and specifically to optical telephones.
With the advent of the all-optical telephone apparatus, it will become necessary to provide some sort of interface device for enabling' a conventional telephone user system to accommodate the new optical-type instead of the conventional electrical-type telephone devices. A conventional electrical central office which routinely sends/receives such messages as transmit, off-hook detection, ring sending and supervision, and accomplishes complicated switching and connection functions, must be somehow made compatible to the new optical phone. While it is anticipated that eventually overall telephone systems will themselves become all optical thus requiring no interface for the new optical phone, such overall system is not yet known to exist. Clearly, therefore, a device capable of interfacing between the optical telephone and a conventional telephone system would be highly desirable.